CHICAGO (Reuters) - Treating anal cancer patients with the
cancer-fighting drug cisplatin to try to shrink tumors before
beginning standard therapy did not boost survival rates, and is
not recommended, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

Evidence from pilot studies led oncologists to believe
giving patients cisplatin, a platinum-based drug commonly used
to fight various cancers, would shrink the primary tumor and
attack the disease that had spread to lymph nodes.

The idea was to give patients a head start before surgery,
further chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

Anal cancer, which the American Cancer Society said will
affect 5,000 Americans this year, is particularly deadly when
the tumors exceed 2 inches in size. Mortality rates from the
cancer have not improved since the early 1990s, the Cancer
Society said.

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"However, it is clear from this data that cisplatin is not
the drug to use and its use should be discontinued in standard
therapy," Dr. Jaffer Ajani of the University of Texas M.D.
Anderson Cancer Center, who led the study, said in a statement.

In the study of 644 patients, 60 percent of those who
received the current standard treatment -- the chemotherapy
drugs fluorouracil plus mitomycin along with radiation -- were
likely to survive five years disease-free. That compared to the
disease-free survival rate of 54 percent among those treated
with cisplatin followed by fluorouracil and radiation.

Overall survival rates were also slightly higher in the
standard treatment group, of whom 28 patients died compared to
54 in the cisplatin group, Ajani's team reported in the Journal
of the American Medical Association.

In addition, 19 percent of the cisplatin group had
colostomies, in which patients' waste is diverted through the
abdomen into a bag they must carry around, compared to 10
percent of standard treatment group.